An anonymous reader writes: If Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-itv-metered-broadband-2010-8 is too be believed, cable companies are frothing at the mouth just waiting to pull the trigger on charging more for giving less. They want to use the excuse that Hulu, YouTube, et al are straining their systems? How can watching one video on Netflix use more bandwidth than the 60 TV channels I receive simultaneously 24 hours a day, whether I watch them or not. It's all coming through my coax. Can the internet side of that cable really put more strain on Comcast?

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The 60 channels they put through are exactly the same to everyone. It's a measured, quantifiable bandwidth consumption, whereas the internet is not.

Lets pretend that the 60 channels use a gigabit of throughput. If you have 10,000 people on that cable, they each receive the same 60 channels, so the total bandwidth usage is still 1 gigabit. Now, pretend each of those 10,000 people is also using _1_ Mb of bandwidth. Now you need an 11 Gigabit pipe instead of a 1 Gigabit one. Put 100,000 people on that cable, a